January 16, 2024

Biohacking

59 minutes

Night vision. Superhuman strength. And… kale salad? In episode 95 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore the weird world of biohackers, who leverage science and technology to optimize their bodies. The movement raises rich philosophical questions, from the blurry ethics of self-experimentation, to the consequences of extreme Cartesian dualism, to the awkward tension in our technological nostalgia for a pastoral paradise. If biohacking taps into the basic human desire to experience and investigate, it perhaps also pushes too far toward transcending our bodies. The stakes are political, metaphysical, and ethical — and your hosts are here to make philosophical sense of it all.

Works Discussed

Dave Asprey, Smarter Not Harder
Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby
Mirjam Grewe-Salfeld, Biohacking, Bodies, and Do-It-Yourself
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Experience"
Max More, The Transhumanist Reader
Joel Michael Reynolds, "Genopower: On Genomics, Disability, and Impairment"
Smithsonian Mag, “200 Frozen Heads and Bodies Await Revival at This Arizona Cryonics Facility”
Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics
Washington Post, “The Key to Glorifying a Questionable Diet? Be a tech bro and call it ‘biohacking'"
Patricia J. Zettler et. al., “Regulating genetic biohacking”

Austin Powers (1997)
If Books Could Kill Podcast
Overthink ep 31. Genomics feat. Joel Michael Reynolds